I have the pleasure of being both dramaturg and fight director for this production, working alongside director DeMone Seraphin.

The two leading actors, Megan Smith & Alphonso Walker Jr., and former students of mine. As an educator, one of my favorite phrases is "former student/current colleague," and I'm proud to be able to use it in this production.

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman premiered at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in 1964. It was awarded an Obie and made into a feature film; it is a touchstone in American theatre history. Baraka hoped to create art that would incite revolution, calling in fact for the destruction of America and the rise of new, more just world.

This is a play written in anger. A brilliant expression of a righteous anger that still resonates today, as many of conditions have not changed. But we are producing it in a spirit of love and the radical optimism he later embraced, in the hopes of illuminating what we might become.

Taking us back to the time of the play itself, Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in 1934, was in the process of severing his ties to his prior life, as he embraced Black Nationalism. Prior to this, he and his first wife, a Jewish woman, had founded a press that published the like of Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. Along with his new identity, he divorced his wife, saying he could no longer be “married to the enemy,” and created increasingly political and controversial work.

Many times in the process of creating this production we have said that the Amiri Baraka who wrote Dutchman would probably have hated what we are doing. Would have had a fit at the fact that half the production staff are Jewish, and would have hated the spirit of benevolence and cooperation in which we created this. We also said that the man he later became, a self-described “Radical Optimist” would have loved what we are doing and where we are going with his work.

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I have far more to say about this play (and playwright) than I can fit into a program note. Some further reading I recommend includes:

Additionally, some of my more popular posts from this blog will also be reprinted there.

I will still be using this blog to write about other topics, both Theatre/Film related and otherwise. Of late I've had a lot of thoughts about technology, real estate/finance, and other topics I haven't written a whole lot about in the past, so you may see some of that on here as time goes on.

Meanwhile, check out The Theatre Times! It's a great project and I'm proud to be a part of it.

One topic that came up repeatedly during the entire program and was of special interest during my workshop was what early career fight directors should be reading.

I submit the following list as what I might call, "a good start" as this list would hopefully serve as a launching point towards further study, and would also give one enough general knowledge to put that further study into perspective.

Like any other design discipline, fight directing begins with the text. I'd like to take a moment to discuss approaching a text as a fight director and/or a movement specialist. While it's obvious that the play must be read before any other work is done, what one is looking for when they read and how one's findings are utilized hasn't had a whole lot of public discussion.

The review below was originally commissioned by The Journal of Asian Martial Arts, just before the journal discontinued their print edition. I am presenting it on my blog as I feel that this book is deserving of attention. I've added a small handful of hyperlinks for the purposes of this post.

Michael Clarke’s Shin Gi Tai: Karate Training for Body, Mind, and Spiritis simultaneously an auto-ethnography of a prominent Karateka, a series of history lessons on the system as a cultural practice, and an anthropological analysis of the current state of karate from a very definite perspective. Instructionally, it is not so much a “how to” book, but a guideline for those who are finding their own way (though there are detailed descriptions of example exercises).

I've noticed what appears to me to be a disproportionate amount of anxiety from people at several levels of the field about writing bios for programs and such.

What I intend to present here is a series of templates and principles that should make the task take under five minutes and be a relatively low stress endeavor.

The purpose of the bio is to let the audience (including other industry professionals) know a bit of additional relevant information about you. While to some degree it can serve to establish the credibility of the artistic team, if you are early in your career (or even doing your first show) that is also an interesting bit of information to an audience. (With that in mind please realize that no one worth knowing is going to judge you harshly for being new to the field, so don't worry about having a short bio.)

This post is particularly aimed at people early in their careers. Remember that you'll be getting more credits as you go, which means that your bio can change constantly throughout a season.

These are all fairly flexible and geared for short bios. Long-form bios are basically expansions on the template. (I have bios for several of the disciplines I work in throughout my site).

As some of you know, I became an Artistic Associate of Whistler in the Dark Theatre in late 2011 after numerous collaborations. Part of what this means is that I have the ability to initiate projects through the organization.

I'm currently curating two ongoing projects that are near and dear to my interests: the Playwright Incubator Program and the Schollah Holla Project. I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss the Schollah Holla Project, as it has already had public events, and as we have one more Holla coming up soon as part of our programming for our production of Vinegar Tom (January 27th for those of you intending to come).